I slipped my hand under the pup’s chest and lifted his front paws off the ground, then did a one-hand lift to cuddle him against my own chest.
I said, “How in the world did a little bitty thing like you get so far away from home? Did a hawk pick you up and carry you? Catch a ride on a turtle?”
He didn’t answer, just burrowed into my bosom as if he liked the warmth.
I thought he’d been through too much trauma to add a ride in a stranger’s car, so I walked through some parking lots and side streets to the Lyon’s Mane. At the salon, I pulled open the glass door and stepped into the odor of shampoo, styling products, and singed hair. A young woman with lizard-green eye shadow and hair in white Statue of Liberty spires stood behind a tall reception desk talking on a phone. Before I got to her, a ponytailed marionette of a man came clattering around the desk on backless clogs. His arms were raised from the elbows and his hands were flapping excitedly.
“Oh, my God, you’ve found Baby!”
He grabbed toward me, and I hastily put the puppy into his grasping hands. The puppy licked the man’s lips while he cooed and kissed its nose.
I said, “He was under an oleander bush. They’re poisonous, so I hope he didn’t try to eat any of the leaves.”
“Baby? Eat a leaf off a bush? Hell, Baby won’t even eat dog food! My wife feeds him off her plate.”
I smiled and nodded, polite as anything, and edged toward the door. I’d done my good deed for the day, and breakfast was close by.
The man said, “Hold on! There’s a reward for bringing Baby home.”
I waved him off like Lady Bountiful telling the peasants they didn’t owe her anything. “That’s okay. Glad to do it.”
He stopped patting Baby and stared at my head. “No offense, hon, but who’s been cutting your hair? The yard man?”
Actually, I’d cut it myself, and I thought I’d done a pretty good job. My hair is straight and just hangs there, so cutting it isn’t like rocket science. Nevertheless, my hand went anxiously to my head. Suggest to a woman that her hair is bad, and her hand is compelled to feel it.
“You think it’s uneven?”
“Doll, if it was any choppier, people would get seasick just from looking at it. Sit down and I’ll even it up for you. A reward for rescuing Baby.”
I gave a fleeting thought to breakfast, and dropped into his chair. No woman in her right mind would turn down an opportunity to get her hair trimmed by a master stylist.
I said, “Maybe just a teeny bit off.”
He flapped a hand from a loose wrist. “Sweetie, you just leave it to me. You’re gonna love it. By the way, my name’s Maurice.”
He pronounced it Maur-eeese.
I said, “I’ve heard of you. My friend Laura Halston is one of your clients.”
As soon as I said it, I was afraid I’d mentioned Laura’s name to elevate myself from a strange woman in cheap shoes to a person who was in the same league with his clientele.
He said, “Oh, Laura! Isn’t she gorgeous? And just as down-to-earth as she can be.”
He scooted away to settle the pup in its own monogrammed basket, and I looked at the hair stuff laid out on his workstation. I didn’t know what half of it was. A shallow shelf under the work top held a couple of glossy glamour magazines, and I pulled one out and looked at the photograph on the cover. It was the generic photo that every glamour magazine has—airbrushed close-up of a young woman with carefully applied eyeliner and fake eyelashes that somebody spent an hour or two lacquering and separating so they look like heavy fringe, chemically colored hair with extensions teased and gelled and sprayed to mimic the way healthy hair would look if nothing had ever been done to it, and a pouting, seductive mouth plump with collagen shots. We are all supposed to believe that if we only purchase the products advertised in those magazines, we too can look like the cover model, but not even the cover models look like that.
Maurice came back and grabbed a pair of scissors. “Put the magazine down, because I’m going to turn you around so you’re facing me instead of the mirror. You just relax.”
I immediately tensed up, because my experience is that when somebody says, “You just relax,” you’re in for a harrowing time.
Maurice spun me around and began to cut and snip like a wild man, sending pieces of hair flying all over the place. I was so disappointed I could have cried. Sarasota women have two hairstyles: Barbie-doll long and highlighted white blond, or short and chopped off at the nape of the neck. The Barbie-doll do has bangs that hang over the eyebrows, the chopped-off do is frothed up on the crown like meringue. There is no in between.
I stand up for myself against alligators, religious fanatics, and gun-toting madmen, but I am a hopeless coward with hairdressers. I not only thank them for bad haircuts, I pay them and tip them. Then I go home and recut my hair. It’s disgusting to be a hairdresser wimp, but I am. And every time, while I’m in the chair being ruined, I rationalize my cowardice by telling myself that my hair will grow out, that a bad haircut won’t last forever.
Maurice knelt in front of me to get a better angle with his scissors. He had kind eyes.
He said, “I worry about her.”
“Who?”
“Laura. With that awful husband of hers, I think she should hire a bodyguard. But she’s so brave, she just acts like there’s no danger. And then there’s that other man after her. I feel bad that she met him here, but it’s out of my hands, you know? She’s an adult and she can see anybody she wants to.”
Maurice apparently didn’t share my disinclination to gossip about his clients, and I felt a bit let down. Laura had apparently told Maurice everything she’d told me, plus he knew about a man she hadn’t even mentioned. So I wasn’t so special after all. I wondered how many other people knew her story.
He stood up and whirled me around so I could see myself, and I made an involuntary gasp of surprise.
I felt like Julie Christie in the old movie Shampoo. My hair wasn’t any shorter, and I didn’t know exactly what was different, but now it looked as if it needed a man’s fingers running through it.
Maurice smiled. “Now that’s kick-ass hair!”
The front door flew open and a woman built like a manatee came charging in. She had large dark eyes with lots of dramatic makeup, shiny black hair cut close to her head like a skullcap, and she wore lavender Lycra tights under a bright orange smock. She should have looked ridiculous, but she looked oddly exotic.
In a deep baritone, she bawled, “Baby!” and snatched the Chihuahua pup from its basket.
Misty-eyed, Maurice said, “That’s my wife.”
I didn’t know whether he was on the verge of crying because my hair was so gorgeous or because his wife was so . . . so much.
To his wife, Maurice said, “Ruby, sweetie, this is . . . who are you, hon?”
Weakly, I said, “I’m Dixie Hemingway.”
As if he’d invented me, Maurice said, “She’s the one found Baby and brought him back to us.”
With Baby held tight against her jutting bosom, Ruby stuck out a hand twice as big as Maurice’s and gave me a firm handshake.
“You’re a pet sitter, aren’t you? I read about you in the paper. Great haircut.”
I allowed as how I was a pet sitter and that I also thought it was a great haircut, but I didn’t respond to the comment about reading about me in the paper. There were only a few times my name had been mentioned in the paper, and none of them were because of events I wanted to remember.
Maurice said, “She’s a friend of Laura Halston’s.”
Ruby opened her mouth to say something enthusiastic, but she closed it when the front door opened and a thick man stalked in, glowering like he owned the place and had caught the employees goofing off. He was donkey-butt ugly, with a deeply pockmarked face and thorny black eyebrows. When he raised his hand to his shades to remove them, several diamond rings glittered on fingers thick as cheap cigars. Maurice and Ruby got quiet, and the smile Ruby gave him was so false it could have been lifted off and pinned to the wall.